British former colonies showing great interest everything empire-ish

For nearly 50 years, everybody has tiptoed around the subject but hardly dared to mention it by name.

Now, the Empire is being brought out of the shadows by the people who were once its subjects.

So great is the interest from Commonwealth subjects keen to know more about their heritage, that the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol is to put the private photographic collections of hundreds of former British colonists on line as part of its new Images of Empire exhibition.

From Thursday, 6,000 never-before-seen images of colonial life, as well as 100 films, will be available online, in a move that — according to the museum's experts — would have been unthinkable even 10 years ago.

The first pictures include the incredible scene of the rhino in the living room, an orphan rescued during Operation Noah to save animals stranded as the newly built Kariba Dam flooded the Zambezi valley in the early 1960s. The creature was called Rupert. The name of the boy sharing the lounge is not recorded.